T H E W I N D 17 



depths the sand-heaped granite platform on which Inagua rests 

 must have pulsed upwards, suddenly thrusting the old beach 

 out of reach of the ocean and forming a new one out of what 

 had been a submarine cliff. 



The geological history of the Bahama Islands is very complex. 

 For countless centuries they have been isolated by great deeps 

 from all other land; they have fallen and risen rhythmically into 

 the depths; whole islands and archipelagos have emerged and 

 disappeared, have been connected and disconnected; the waves 

 have built them up and torn them apart again, scattering their 

 sands over the floor of the blue ocean. They have always been 

 islands of the sea. Never at any period of their history, even dur- 

 ing the glacial era when the level of the waters dropped three 

 or four hundred feet, sucked up by evaporation and deposited 

 as ice at the Poles, did they join or connect with any continental 

 mass. Much of the evidence of this struggle between the sea 

 and the land is obscured, drifted away on the wind and tides 

 or lost forever in the abyss of the ocean. Yet in this valley wall 

 in one breathless sweep was the last page of the story. Inagua 

 was a relatively new island; the sparse soil of the great inland 

 plain, covered only with the thin skim of decayed ceritheum 

 shells and with the grasses,— the figure of speech linking these 

 grasses to the third day of creation was nearer the truth than 

 I imagined— gave added credence to the evidence of the wall. 



The wall terminated abruptly in the first outlying crags 

 of the place called Babylon. I reached these crags just before 

 sunset. A more forbidding vista would be difficult to imagine. 

 Were it not for the fact that I knew that the Bahamas are en- 

 tirely sedimentary in their structure, I would have believed 

 that this was the brim of an active volcano which had just 

 finished erupting, belching out great masses of lava and scoria. 

 The crimson rays of the setting sun cast a flame-colored hue 

 over a maelstrom of violently tumbled rocks, slag-like ridges 



